Eels

Just as in life, "Electro-Shock Blues" seems to fuse the concept of suffering — something we filter at all costs into some other, more manageable shape — in order to dodge the raw truth that accompanies our actions day after day.

If music is Mark Everett's creed, "Electro-Shock Blues" is first and foremost a devastating act of love toward music itself.

In any respectable art form, the thin line separating life from the afterlife gets absorbed into countless shades, yet few of them can be easily mapped onto what Mr. E achieves with "Electro-Shock Blues". In the history of music we've passed through tunnels of suffering fed into frescoes that in turn fed on pain, we've stumbled across tones where the tragic spilled desperately into the grotesque, or even whistled carefree nursery rhymes that concealed the scent of death.

"Electro-Shock Blues" is all of that and none of it. Certainly it's something more, a journey of profound meaning: the desperate attempt to define oneself while laying down coordinates rarely found elsewhere along the common path.

With their debut "Beautiful Freak", Eels had absorbed psychedelia, blues, folk and country, blending and updating it all for the modern era, where hip-hop, grunge and cheap keyboards manage to send a remarkable synthesis of past and future into orbit.

One of the few possible ways of writing great songs. Because we're still talking about an art form whose first goal is to belong to the school of the great songwriters. That's what "Beautiful Freaks" was, with its marks of immediate rebellion, typical of someone daily seeking escape routes from a society that brands us as misfits. Through his music, E managed to find his happy island. His as much as ours.

Inevitably, his gaze was bound to shift elsewhere. Once again a stranger to his surroundings, but ineluctable fate proves stronger than any possible escape.

E finds a diary: "My name's Elizabeth, my life is shit and piss". Then the void. His sister Elizabeth died by suicide, and her diary, full of a lifetime's repression and depression, surfaces in the incipit of "Electro-Shock Blues". Other words spat out by Elizabeth join those above. Death is foretold in just over two whispered minutes strung along sparse guitar chords, which say a great deal about the essence of the journey we've chosen to undertake.

Mark's father died when he was 19. He'd always had a bad relationship with the old man: he never really knew him. "Baby Genius" is dedicated to him, almost an inverted lullaby, its words caressing a host of music boxes propping up a father figure as crucial to shaping the "baby genius" Mark as he was absent, a figure to be shaped instead by childhood imagination.

His mother passed away during the "Electro-Shock Blues" tour, consumed by a cancer that had long been waiting to finally sink its claws in: perhaps he never knew her well enough either. And in its guitar lines, "Dead Of Winter" digs deep into his mother's agonizing radiotherapy treatment and her slow death.

The relationship between Mark and his sister Elizabeth had always been tormented, walking a razor's edge, and as her psychiatric troubles worsened over the years, their exchanges as siblings became as fraught as the immortal affection between them ran deep: this is how "Electro-Shock Blues" becomes an occasion to voice, and explore, his relationship with people as close to Mark by blood as they were, in truth, strangers. But to do so, Mr. E never wallows in self-pity: his lyrics are personal, poignant, yet also laced with that delightful, macabre black humour that marks his entire body of work.

Halfway between Beck's deranged sketches and the mephistophelian crooning of a Tom Waits (see the swinging "Hospital Food" or "Going To Your Funeral Part I"), Mr. E leads us song by song, as if we were moving through the chapters of his deeply personal memoir, into a desperately sad and cruelly real world.

The industrial clangor of "Cancer For The Cure" sets up an incessant electronic beat reminiscent of the Soul Coughing school, over which Mark Everett grafts a vaguely nonsense portrait ("Grandpa's happy watching video porn with the closed caption on") of a monstrous American family (not by chance, the song would end up on the soundtrack of "American Beauty"); an effective hip-hop rhythm, cheery Christmas bells and the "la la la la" hummed by Mr. E barely mask the desperate tone of "My Descent Into Madness", told from the perspective of Everett's sister, who complains: "the jacket makes me straight so i just sit back and bake, you know I think I'm gonna stay" (perhaps the "jacket" in question is a straitjacket?).

Elizabeth's ghost (literally) resurfaces in the gorgeous baroque pop (harpsichord and fierce guitar riffs) of "Last Stop: This Town", where she and her brother fly together over the city before saying goodbye (the album cover depicts exactly this elegiac moment).

But on "Electro-Shock Blues" many souls chase one another following no logic but that of the heart: the breezy country of "Ant Farm" (the violin is Lisa Germano's) turns out to be a passionate declaration of love, the closing "P.S. You Rock My World" is a subdued power pop tune that closes a solemnly funereal record on a note of hope ("I was at a funeral the day I realized I wanted to spend my life with you"), while "Climbing Up To The Moon", probably the most moving track of the bunch, is an intense singer-songwriter piece (embellished by two illustrious guests, Grant Lee Phillips on guitar and Jon Brion on organ) that blossoms into an unforgettable orchestral finale.

Rarely has death been sung about with such inventiveness, passion and clarity, and certainly nothing in the Eels' subsequent, still-honorable body of work would reach the qualitative heights of this second album.

Just as in life, on "Electro-Shock Blues" the parade of tragicomic masks on display is destined to reach its terminus regardless. And just as the irreversible pain seems to have overwhelmed the crumbs of hope, Mark Everett will have completed his flight among the stars and be ready to leave his sister Elizabeth to the sky. In a place where perhaps the girl cannot die twice, where sibling love will be kept safe for eternity.

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07/06/2009